Turning social endorsement into brand passion

Abstract

Internet technology has popularized the “like” as a type of social endorsements on social media. Despite the high impact of brand passion on customer behavior and brand performance, questions remain regarding how social endorsement triggers customer desires toward a brand. This study establishes “like-clicking” behavior on social media as a form of friend-bonding social endorsement and crowd-bridging social endorsement, based on theories of social capital and self-congruence, and examines the extent to which endorsement turns into emotional attachment (i.e., brand passion). Two approaches were employed: Partial Least Square (PLS) and Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA). The PLS and fsQCA results revealed causal and structural associations of friend-bonding and crowd-bridging social endorsements with self-verification and self-enhancement, and thereby with the outcome of obsessive and harmonious brand passion. These findings enrich our understanding of social endorsement. Encouraging customers to endorse the brand through passionate behavior is a sound marketing strategy.